Art Babble

Art Babble is a terrific site that promises to get even better, and probably rapidly.

Art Babble, the tagline for which is “Play Art Loud”, aggregates art related videos from a variety of sources, most notably museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Arts & Design, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Norman Rockwell Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Van Gogh Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; along with Public TV station KQED.

For the most part these seem to be high end, professionally made videos that delve into a variety of art subjects. I’ve only had chance to watch one full video so far, and perhaps I got lucky, but I found it fascinating, illuminating and nicely erudite without being stuffy or overly technical.

Research in progress: Van Gogh and contemporaries (images above), from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is a short in which a restorer from the museum examines a painting by Van Gogh and a painting by Monet side by side, utilizing a range of approaches, from naked eye to microscope to x-ray to ultraviolet, and explores similarities in their painting technique, the use of broken color and the choice to allow the ground to show through the brushstrokes to add to the color and texture of the painting.

if the other videos are of this quality, I’ll be looking for a lot of spare moments to return to the site.

You can view the list of videos by topic (“Channels”), by artist, by series or by the participating institution.